from WIRED magazine, 11/20/2014
In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall began to fall, American artist Jim Sanborn was busy working on his Kryptos sculpture, a cryptographic puzzle wrapped in a riddle that he created for the CIA’s headquarters and that has been driving amateur and professional cryptographers mad ever since.
To honor the 25th anniversary of the Wall’s demise and the artist’s 69th birthday this year, Sanborn has decided to reveal a new clue to help solve his iconic and enigmatic artwork. It’s only the second hint he’s released since the sculpture was unveiled in 1990 and may finally help unlock the fourth and final section of the encrypted sculpture, which frustrated sleuths have been struggling to crack for more than two decades.
Kryptos, a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Langley, Virginia.
The 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and wood sculpture on the grounds of the CIA complex in Langley, Virginia, contains four encrypted messages carved out of the metal, three of which were solved years ago. The fourth is composed of just 97 letters, but its brevity belies its strength. Even the NSA, whose master crackers were the first to decipher other parts of the work, gave up on cracking it long ago. So four years ago, concerned that he might not live to see the mystery of Kryptos resolved, Sanborn released a clue to help things along, revealing that six of the last 97 letters when decrypted spell the word “Berlin”—a revelation that many took to be a reference to the Berlin Wall.
To that clue today, he’s adding the next word in the sequence—“clock”—that may or may not throw a wrench in this theory. Now the Kryptos sleuths just have to unscramble the remaining 86 characters to find out.
Is a Clock a Clock?
The Berlin Clock, or the Set Theory Clock. John Freeman/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images
Sanborn told WIRED that he’s always been fascinated by Berlin’s many clocks but the Berlin Clock in particular has intrigued him the most. The clock, also known as the Berlin Uhr or Set Theory Clock, was designed in the 1970s by inventor and tinkerer Dieter Binninger. It displays the time through illuminated colored blocks rather than numbers and requires the viewer to calculate the time based on a complex scheme.
A yellow lamp at the top of the clock blinks every two seconds while a row of red lamps beneath it represent five hours. Red lights on a second row denote one hour each, and time is calculated based on the number of lights illuminated. “So if in the first line 2 lamps are lit and in the second line 3 lamps, it’s 5+5+3=13h or 1 p.m.,” notes one description of the timepiece.
“Most people have no idea who Dieter is and all of the other people who make strange clocks in Berlin,” Sanborn says. “There’s a very interesting back story to
The focus on the clock, however, may just be a bit of sly misdirection from Sanborn—who is known among Kryptos fans for his puckishness.
The Mystery of the Riddle
“In part of the code that’s been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that’s on the ground of the agency,” Sanborn said during a 2005 interview with WIRED. “So in order to find that place, you have to decipher the piece and then go to the agency and find that place.”
The riddle may refer to something Sanborn buried on the CIA grounds at the time he installed the sculpture, possibly in a location spelled out in section two of the sculpture, which lists a set of latitude and longitude coordinates: 38 57 6.5 N and 77 8 44 W. Sanborn has said they refer to “locations of the agency.”
Dunin has suggested that the coordinates may refer to the location of a Berlin Wall monument on the CIA grounds. Three slabs from the Berlin Wall sit at the spy agency’s headquarters, a gift from the German government. Sanborn has also told WIRED that the collapse of the wall was “big news” at the time he was “casting about” for things he wanted to include in his sculpture. However, the wall monument wasn’t dedicated at the CIA until 1992, two years after Kryptos was unveiled. Although the coordinates of the monument’s location—38 57 2.5 N, 77 8 40 W—differ from the coordinates mentioned in Kryptos by four seconds in both the latitude and longitude, Dunin has speculated that the CIA may have originally planned to position the monument at the coordinates Sanborn mentions on Kryptos but then later chose a different location. Alternatively, Sanborn may have been using an incorrect U.S. geological map when he created his sculpture and thus got the coordinates wrong, she notes. After all, Sanborn has other errors in his sculpture, both intentional and unintentional.
The New York Times Science section has also published a copy of the text of the Kronos sculpture [here], including the deciphered sections.
